One person’s experience becoming a business owner shows how our economy is based on luck rather than merit and how it rewards people who own stuff rather than people who do stuff.
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The Monsters, Inc. Argument for Unconditional Basic Income
How to convert an economy based on fear to one based on joy
David Graeber: "Spotlight on the financial sector did make apparent just how bizarrely skewed our economy is in terms of who gets rewarded"
David Graeber explains why the more your job helps others, the less you get paid
Universal Basic Income Is Silicon Valley’s Latest Scam
The plan is no gift to the masses, but a tool for our further enslavement
The Everywhere Millionaire: Who Is Really Rich in America and How They Got There
From two leading economists comes a groundbreaking new portrait of the hidden fortunes of Main Street business owners—ordinary Americans who built extraordinary wealth and are quietly rewriting the rules of money and power. Most people think the path to great wealth runs through Wall Street or Silicon Valley. We’re told you must be a Zuckerberg, a Musk, or a Jamie Dimon to get rich. But this story is wrong. Drawing on unprecedented data from a decade of research and vivid real-life stories of entrepreneurs—from a self-made hot-dog stand billionaire to the heirs of an auto dealer—Zidar and Zwick reveal a surprising truth: prosperity is more attainable, more widely distributed, and closer to home than we imagine. A multitude of Americans have built staggering fortunes by running often unglamorous businesses far from the spotlight. A quiet revolution in the business world—the rise of “pass-through” firms like S-corporations and partnerships—supercharged this wealth, channeling vast income directly to business owners rather than traditional corporations.Part economic detective story, part roadmap to riches, this book reveals: —The Hidden 1%: They might be a local beer distributor, a dentist with a regional network of practices, a commercial HVAC contractor with trucks around town, or a restaurateur who keeps opening new locations. For every public company CEO, more than a thousand private business owners each have transformational wealth.— The Blueprint for Wealth: Zidar and Zwick describe where Main Street Millionaires come from, how they grew rich, and how much money they make. Their stories suggest the American Dream is not dead and many paths to prosperity remain open today. — Power Brokers: Armed with their fortunes, Main Street Millionaires wield power in city halls, statehouses, and Washington, often bending policy to protect what they’ve built. They are both growing the economic pie and grabbing bigger slices for themselves.The Everywhere Millionaire celebrates the stories of entrepreneurs who seized opportunities while asking hard questions about how concentrated wealth and power shape society. It is an essential guide to seeing the economy as it really is and recognizing the surprising paths to prosperity—and influence—everywhere.
Psychological Ownership in Financial Decisions
Policy makers have long intuitively realized the benefit of encouraging strong psychological ownership toward social programs. For example, Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 1930s purposely designed the Social Security program to include a high feeling of ownership by workers, to generate a sense of responsibility and protection from future legislation. Recent research suggests that this sense of ownership continues to be an important part of the SSA program and is a significant predictor of when retirees claim their benefits. Strong feelings of ownership also exist for other programs (e.g., Medicare) and financial services (e.g., investments), and there are significant implications of that psychological ownership on consumers’ decisions and behavior around these programs. Policy makers and marketers may wish to consider the role of interventions that affect consumers’ psychological ownership, along with feelings of trust and fairness, for such products.
Introducing the Ownership Model Canvas
A new tool to re-align business success with ownership
Making Business Personal
Business can be a form of activism, art, spirituality, and creative expression.
A Universal Basic Income Is a Poor Tool to Fight Poverty (Published 2016)
In this world where work remains an important social, psychological and economic anchor, there are better tools to help than giving every American a monthly check.
Overcoming Barriers to Employee Ownership: Insights From Small and Medium-Sized Businesses
This research investigates the limited adoption of employee stock ownership plans (ESOPs) among small-to-medium sized businesses (SMBs) in the U.S. Through interviews with 30 SMB owners across various industries, we identify the key barriers to ESOP adoption as lack of time, money, and skills on the part of the owners. In doing so, the study suggests that a “shared ownership light” model, which involves sharing profits, information, and decision-making opportunities with employees, appears more feasible for SMBs than ESOPs. For SMBs that are interested in ESOP adoption, our research suggests that organizations providing employee ownership services could better assist SMBs by offering templatized models and best practices for profit-sharing plans, open-book management, and structured employee participation. The paper aims to broaden the discussion around shared ownership by considering a spectrum of options that have the potential to increase both value creation by and value-sharing among employees.
Investing in Enterprises That Work for Everyone (SSIR)
Impact investors can support a more just economy by prioritizing alternative ownership enterprises that shift power away from shareholders to workers, the community, and the planet. <meta property=
How To Be Successful
I’ve observed thousands of founders and thought a lot about what it takes to make a huge amount of money or to create something important. Usually, people start off wanting the former and end up...
The Role of Luck in Life Success Is Far Greater Than We Realized
Are the most successful people in society just the luckiest people?
Is America Encouraging the Wrong Kind of Entrepreneurship?
In a 1990 paper, “Entrepreneurship: Productive, Unproductive, and Destructive,” late economist William Baumol argued that not all entrepreneurs are equal: there are both “productive” and “unproductive” endeavors. Most people think of all entrepreneurship to be what Baumol referred to as the “productive” kind, where the companies that founders launch commercialize something new or better, benefiting society and themselves in the process. Baumol was worried, however, by a very different sort of entrepreneur, the “unproductive” ones who exploit special relationships with the government to construct regulatory moats, secure public spending for their own benefit, or bend specific rules to their will — in the process, stifling competition to create advantage for their firms. Two recent trends indicate that this may be happening in the U.S. today: rising profits, especially those earned by the largest businesses in the economy, and suggestive evidence of an increase in efforts to shape the rules of the game. Baumol may have been ahead of his time. If the U.S. is going to tackle its many problems, we are going to have to find ways to encourage would-be entrepreneurs to start innovative, productive businesses, rather than dedicating their efforts to co-opting government in order to secure economic advantage.
What I Learned Selling Bingo Card Creator
Some lessons learned in selling a bootstrapped software business. Relevant to buyers or sellers.